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Contents
editorial
DJO BANKUNA
Pissing On The Rainbow Nation
NATHAN TRANTRAAL
Ôs haatie wit mense nie. Hoekô haat julle vi ôs?
GLENN HOLTZMAN
The Music Department in South Africa as a Mirror of Racial Tension and Transformative Struggle: A Critical Ethnographic Perspective
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Black artists and the paradox of the gift
Theme Johnny Mbizo Dyani
ZWELEDINGA PALLO JORDAN
JOHNNY DYANI: A Portrait
JOHNNY MBIZO DYANI
A Letter From Mbizo
ARYAN KAGANOF
Johnny Dyani Interview 22-23 December 1985
SALIM WASHINGTON
“Don’t Sell Out”
LOUIS MOHOLO-MOHOLO & HERBIE TSOAELI WITH JOHNNY DYANI
In Conversation with Mbizo
ZOLISWA FIKELEPI-TWANI & NDUDUZO MAKHATHINI
When Today Becomes The Past: The Archive as a Healing Process
ASHER GAMEDZE
Tradition as improvisation | Continuity and abstraction
GILBERT MATTHEWS & LEFIFI TLADI
An Interview with Lars Rasmussen
EUGENE SKEEF
The Musical Confluence of Johnny Dyani and Bheki Mseleku in Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script i: The Figure
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script ii: Ontology Of The Bass
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iii: Musical Offering
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script iv: Home And Exile
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script v: Experimental Philosophic Incantations
TENDAYI SITHOLE
Blue Scripts For Johnny Mbizo Dyani - Script vi: The Posthumous Life
ED EPSTEIN
Spiritual
CAROL MULLER
Diasporic musical landscapes: Abdullah Ibrahim, Johnny Dyani, and Sathima Bea Benjamin in an African Space Program (1969-1980)
BENJAMIN ZEPHANIAH
Riot in Progress (Legalize Freedom)
S’MAKUHLE BOKWE MAFUNA
Notes on the Exile Years
KEI MURRAY MONGEZI PROSPER MCGREGOR
Who the Son was?
ARYAN KAGANOF
Somebody Blew Up South Africa
JONATHAN EATO
Interludes with Bra’ Tete Mbambisa
MAX ANNAS
Morduntersuchungskommission. Der Fall Daniela Nitschke
SHANE COOPER
Lonely Flower
THANDI ALLIN DYANI
"I love you. You don’t have to love me but I love you."
galleri
SLOVO MAMPHAGA
Shades of Johnny Dyani
HUGH MDLALOSE
Jazz is my Life
TJOBOLO KHAHLISO
Shebeening
FEDERICO FEDERICI
Notes (not only) on asemic phenomenology
ANDRÉ CLEMENTS
Vita-Socio-Anarcho
DEREK DAVEY
Verge
borborygmus
MUSTAPHA JINADU
Trapped
VUSUMZI MOYO
From Cape-to-Cairo – AZANIA
MALAIKA WA AZANIA
In a foreign tongue...
SHARLENE KHAN
Imagining an African Feminist Press
DILIP MENON
Isithunguthu (A conversation in Joburg)
CATHERINE RUDENT
Against the “Grain of the Voice” - Studying the voice in songs
GEORGE LEWIS
Amo (2021), for five voices and electronics
STEVEN SHAVIRO
Exceeding Syncopation?
BRUCE LABRUCE
Notes on camp/anti-camp
PATRICIA PISTERS
Set and Setting of the Brain on Hallucinogen: Psychedelic Revival in the Acid Western
frictions
KHADIJA TRACEY HEEGER
Doctor Patient
KNEO MOKGOPA
Vuleka Mhlaba (What Would Happen if Madiba Returned?)
CHURCHIL NAUDE
Die mooi mooi gedig en anner massekinners ….
OSWALD KUCHERERA
Travelling on the Khayelitsha Train
SISCA JULIUS
Islands in the stream
FAEEZ VAN DOORSEN
Nobody’s Mullet
GADDAFI MAKHOSANDILE
The Face of Hope
VONANI BILA
Extracts from Phosakufa (the epic)
NIQ MHLONGO
Mistaken Identity
OMOSEYE BOLAJI
People of the Townships part 2
SIMBARASHE NYATSANZA
How to Become an African President
JEAN RHYS
The Doll
OSCAR HEMER
Coyote
MICHALIS PICHLER
Bibliophagia
claque
LINDELWA DALAMBA
From Kippie to Kippies and Beyond: the village welcomes this child
GWEN ANSELL
Zim Ngqawana: A child of the rain
MKHULULI
Black Noise: Notes on a Semanalysis of Mogorosi’s DeAesthetic
LIZE VAN ROBBROECK
DECOLONIZING ART BOOK FAIRS: Publishing Practices from the South(s).
DYLAN VALLEY
The Future lies with folk art: Max Schleser’s smartphone filmmaking THEORY AND PRACTICE
PAUL KHAHLISO
Riding Ruins
DIANA FERRUS
Ronelda Kamfer’s Kompoun: unapologetic and honest writing.
UNATHI SLASHA
Piecing Together the Barely Exquisite Corpse: On Tinashe Mushakavanhu’s Reincarnating Marechera: Notes on the Speculative Archive
WANELISA XABA
One from the heart: Dimakatso Sedite's Yellow Shade
BLAQ PEARL (JANINE VAN ROOY-OVERMEYER)
Uit die Kroes: gedigte deur Lynthia Julius
FRANK MEINTJIES
Wild Has Roots: thinking about what it means to be human
MPHUTHUMI NTABENI
The Land Wars: The Dispossession of the Khoisan and AmaXhosa in the Cape Colony - a discourse on the unrelenting and ruthless process of colonial conquest
ekaya
MKHULU MNGOMEZULU
Call Me By My Name: Ubizo and Ancestral Names for Abangoma
HILDE ROOS
In Conversation with Zakes Mda: "The full story must be told."
INGE ENGELBRECHT
Tribute to Sacks Williams: A composer from Genadendal
ESTHER MARIE PAUW
A tribute to Hilton Biscombe
WILLEMIEN FRONEMAN
Resisting the Siren Song of Race
off the record
SANDILE MEMELA
Things My Father Taught Me
HEIDI GRUNEBAUM
On returning to my grandmother’s land (notes for a film)
HILTON BISCOMBE
A boytjie from Stellenbosch
KHOLEKA SHANGE
Art, Archives, Anthropology
RITHULI ORLEYN
On Archives, Metadata and Aesthetics
KEYAN G. TOMASELLI
The Nomadic Mind of Teshome Gabriel: Hybridity, Identity and Diaspora
FINN DANIELS-YEOMAN & DARA WALDRON
Song For Hector - the utopian promise of the archive
TREVOR STEELE TAYLOR
Censorship, Film Festivals and the Temperature at which Artworks and their Creators Burn - episode 2
GEORGE KING
Sustaining an Imagined Culture: Some Reflections on South African Music Research in Thirty-Five Years of Ars Nova
RAFI ALIYA CROCKETT
Loxion Fabulous: Temporality and Spaciality in South African Kwaito Performance
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Monday 20 January 2020
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Forget Nietzsche
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute
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    #07
  • claque

PAUL KHAHLISO

Riding Ruins

there lingers an unspecific relationship between ruins and memory and even though ruins cannot be assigned to individuals it was individuals who crafted the spirit of any place and its episodic memories these memories float like enigmatic artifacts unearthed esoterically by those scaling geographical or spiritual ruins hair raising ghostly purrs that haunt archeologists and anyone obsessed with rocks in orchestrated form And a ruin as formation from a past untraceable any presumable destruction of the original structures is also etched within its embossed corners of memories therefore would any visible traces of past memories recorded or otherwise recalled become impediment to formations of new memories? And when ruins are consciously revived and excavated as object of venerable beauty devoid of innate beauty but purified by a new aesthetic appreciation for decay such an experience ought be captured in filmic impurity by a filmmaker who has translated the invisible to the visible Ruins Rider is a form of deification of spoliation of monumental architecture that symbolized affluence of an elitist civilization perhaps But perhaps a visual excavation of spirits in a metaphorical audio-visual archeology entranced by multiple layers of memories viewed from a mystified vantage point flickering color eerie multi-layered imagery of memory in conflict and recollection as a mental mosaic that often rouses visual simulacra that are fluid and chromatically disorienting these and other sensations are rooted in the oneiric nature of remembering decay as represented in Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt’s Ruins Rider.

in this audio-visual artwork said to have been filmed “in the Balkan wilderness” the artist appears to invade various lamenting spaces with their innate cues to trigger memories seeming to possess also an examinable trance nature where presences are felt in their assumed absences Ruins Rider is such a dream (Akashic) record which captures estimations of existent other(post)worldly shells of spirits proposing for viewers and co-experiencers to coin fresh optical stratagems for reflecting on hinted invisibles Hovering on the edge of a trance are images on the threshold of a disturbed dream richly colored aberrations fleeting with sonic fragmentations static hiss and noise compositions to form a non-static narrative anon static narra tive as I sit bracing each nerve for the following bend of light other syllables of past hymns to drown me in a sound stream orchestrated by musical waves that invoke paralysis; by the end of this expedition a droning black poses its sickness as a relief from 49 minutes of being lost
in time.

RAW POWER

Energy release, rigorous temper, violence as hallucinogen dilation sends eyes pulsating in visual streaks of skin dancing in a ring of rage; RAW POWER is trippy and on the brink of an emergency. Smeared across a screen exhibiting is an image that at first doesn’t appropriate anything or action, until slight movement of angle of view connects us to the visceral experience of a boxer in full exertion, in a state distinct from sleep but on that verge of spectral dissolution. Eventually, with a negligible merger of sound with image, random speckles whirling in circular lines emerge, orderly strokes akin to a Jackson Pollok painting fill a cathode frame with movements, motion beyond spectral confines. Rogue imagery of a person in violent excesses, irreducible and independent of translation, RAW POWER is a metaphor on the luxury of violence, its induced trance a testament to the transience of all human activity. There is a circle; an inlet of air at the heart of this whirlpool or hurricane winging in circles its soot around a nucleus of tension. In a sense, Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt’s RAW POWER is perception of a boxer in fluid continuum, without persistence but allowing images to flow in a river of dance, violent as it might be, but still a dance, a motion towards a dissolution of identifiable reality. Shadowboxing? Arms and fists as Liquid Swords? Swords swung like brush strokes in a calligrapher’s grasp? What is happening here? A Meditation On Violence?

HYPNAGOGIA

Something volcanic spewing,
strobes on screen like violent
colours of a rupture and sound
harnessing terror upwelling
from convergent layers of a
state before dreaming in explosions.

Here it seems yet another celestial body
is probed by Vaillancourt’s mastering of
the oneiric, hazards and eruptions of
memory, the landscape looks “unearthical”.

Black-body radiation on edges of undefined
contours, a kind of fuel for the hallucination
at play, temperate and blue and orange and
purple with crimson veneer pulsating to
a rhythm of light as brush strokes on cathode.

Then some inverted symphony lays an aural
foundation that provides unsmooth glides
into a somewhat irrational narrative (or non-narrative?),
through which to sail an unknown dimension
hidden within each hypnotically flashed image.

Yet, the eye embraces a chorus of disarray,
allowing the assault to slide like magma
into crevices of numbed minds.

And what does the word HYPNOGOGIA mean?
I wondered, when recently was introduced to this
film art encounter. I found out it has to do with sleep…
or a state before sleep. If in sleep one’s brain

deletes excess information, then it follows that
a medley of hues would blaze with flames that
consumes images, emotions, fleeting moments
tasted and soon discarded.

Pierre-Luc Vaillancourt’s filmic art is a sensorial
engagement that dares one to question all keys to
the doors of perception, a plunge into blind fate,
unassailably divergent, but thriving within a solemn
geometry of limited vision and thought.

As electric as his images yawn a new breath unto
sight, the aural is an inhalation of scents beyond the
gates of consciousness and unconsciousness,
which pursues into a clutter of debris that
which becomes the final calm.

But there are no absolutes in his imagery,
imagery that prays to be released from images,
images imprisoned in a screen that is a
firmament upon which memory is captured
never to reach us in time.

Again, exhausted, mind frosted with ash from
exploded consciousness, and fading into
reverberations of this compendium of film art,
I wonder if I were not a dreamer with defects
of recollection, an amnesiac on the verge
of another dream within a dream.

This is when cinema takes on the séance
with the material, when mind and orchestrated
sights dance as though they were cousins
in a murder of reality, of the GOD OF THE

PERCEIVED, a penetration behind the winds
of puppet vision, behind shawls of ghosts
simmering in rocks, laden on landscapes and
hiding among prism coloured shrubs.

These film artworks are a punch in the etheric
face of conservative ingestion of sensory data,
some sobering slap on any puritanical view
of sanctity and vulgarity.

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DYLAN VALLEY
DIANA FERRUS
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Archive About Contact Africa Open Institute